title: A bi-prototype theory of facial attractiveness.
abstract: The attractiveness of human faces can be predicted with a high degree of accuracy if we represent the faces as feature vectors and compute their relative distances from two prototypes: the average of attractive faces and the average of unattractive faces. Moreover, the degree of attractiveness, defined in terms of the relative distance, exhibits a high degree of correlation with the average rating scores given by human assessors. These findings motivate a bi-prototype theory that relates facial attractiveness to the averages of attractive and unattractive faces rather than the average of all faces, as previously hypothesized by some researchers.
authors.affiliation: Information Science, Academia Sinica, Taipei, 115, Taiwan. fchang@iis.sinica.edu.tw
authors.forename: Fu
authors.initials: F
authors.lastname: Chang
authors.forename: Chien-Hsing
authors.initials: CH
authors.lastname: Chou
mesh_terms: D004644:Emotions; D005145:Face; D005149:Facial Expression; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D010364:Pattern Recognition, Visual / Q000502:physiology; D011582:Psychological Theory; D012737:Sex Factors